


The Life You Save May Not Be Your Own

by Fantasyenabler



Category: Captain America (Movies), Warehouse 13
Genre: Crossover, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-24
Updated: 2014-09-25
Packaged: 2018-02-18 15:25:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2353241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fantasyenabler/pseuds/Fantasyenabler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Warehouse artifacts are not to be used for personal gain.  But here's the question: Who determines what counts as personal gain?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Agents Down

**Author's Note:**

> This first chapter was sort of inspired by this gif:  
> http://dehaans.tumblr.com/post/95706579719/the-unsung-heroes

On the day three SHIELD helicarriers crashed into the Potomac River, Claudia Donovan felt like she was melting. Milledgeville, Georgia, in late April was definitely where Frosty the Snowman had gone to die, she thought, as she glared up at the afternoon sun, and she was going to be next if her Warehouse partner, Steve Jinks, didn’t come outside soon and give her the car keys. Flannery O’Connor’s old house held a certain amount of Southern charm, she supposed, but it was a bit hard for her to appreciate it at the moment. The two extra-long neutralizer bags currently hanging across her gross, sweaty shoulders, and the bulky, cursed artifacts they contained were definitely getting in the way. 

Groaning, she shifted the bags and tried not to grimace. Every time she did, one of the damned Peacocks strutting around the surrounding farmlands would stop and stare at her like it expected her to attack at any moment now.

She sighed at it and forced herself to turn away.

It hadn’t even been that hard of a mission, she thought. Thanks to her and Steve building a quick rapport with the team running the famous writer’s estate, O’Connor’s crutches were found and neutralized quickly. No longer would they push people to drive aimlessly along back roads, always thinking that the place they wanted was just around the bend, and ignoring the demands of their tired, hungry bodies.

But now her body was growing tired and her stomach grumbled angrily.

A good man might be hard to find, she thought, but she knew for a fact there were a couple of good restaurants right there in town. And once Steve finally stopped talking to the people inside, she fully intended to go and grab something to eat before they drove into Atlanta and jumped on the next plane headed in South Dakota’s general direction.

That is, if the people inside ever decided to let him come out. Contrary to Steve’s pre-mission jitters, no one in Milledgeville seemed to have the slightest problem talking to a gay federal agent.

Now if she could just get them to stop talking….

Her Farnsworth buzzing in her purse caused her to roll her eyes and mutter a few choice words. Carefully, she leaned the bagged crutches against the front of the house, before pulling out and popping open the loudly demanding communication device.

“Myka,” she said, as the other Warehouse agent’s face appeared on the small viewscreen. “What’s up? I thought you and Pete were on your way to Chicago?”

Myka shook her head, her long dark hair bouncing slightly. “Chicago’s going to have to wait, I’m afraid,” she said, her face tightening. “And so’s Georgia. You and Steve need to head back immediately, regardless of whether or not you’ve found what was causing all of those car crashes.” 

Claudia glanced back at the house. Steve was walking through the front door, and she nodded at him to come closer before turning back to the screen. “That’s not a prob,” she said. “We found it already. In fact, we were planning on leaving right after we get some food.”

A new face appeared to share the screen with Myka. The line of Pete’s mouth was grim, and his eyes held none of their usual mischievous humor. “Skip the food,” he said. “Seriously, Claud. The two of you need to get back to the Warehouse right now.”

Beside her, she felt Steve move, as he first picked up the crutches, and then leaned back towards the Farnsworth. “We’re on our way,” he said, the tone of his voice telling her that she wasn’t dealing with her pal, “Jinksy,” anymore. “Is there anything we should be cautious of?” he asked, as his body language hardened, completing his shift into what Claudia thought of as his “one hundred percent ATF agent” mode.

Myka shook her head. “We’re not sure,” she said. “All we can tell you is that there might be a danger. But honestly, we’re not even certain about that.” Myka tilted her head towards a spot somewhere behind her, and Claudia thought she caught sight of Artie pacing with a cell phone pressed against his face. “Artie’s talking to the Regents right now, trying to get some answers.”

Claudia watched the edges of Artie’s form disappear from the frame before focusing all of her attention back on Pete and Myka. “What answers?” she asked. “What’s happened that you’re all so worried?”

Pete and Myka looked at each other, their eyes communicating something that chilled Claudia for no reason she could name. 

Then Myka turned back and said, “Someone’s attacked SHIELD. Three helicarriers crashed in DC, and their headquarters, the Triskelion, is in flames.” 

So? Claudia almost asked. What does that have to do with us? It wasn’t like the other agencies even knew about the Warehouse, and the odds of one of the emotionally-created artifacts the Warehouse tracked down and collected being involved in the attack were in the realm of “slim to none.”

But then she noticed the wetness gathering at the edges of Myka’s eyes and remembered that Pete and Myka were Secret Service, that they’d been posted in DC before Mrs. Frederic recruited them to work for the Warehouse. And that they had friends who’d gone on to other agencies…

And of course, SHIELD was considered the biggest “get” in the federal agent game. The sign that you’d made the big-time, that you were among the best of the best.

Suddenly, Claudia felt the barrier that sometimes still came up between Claudia, the teenage hacker, and Pete, Myka, and Steve, the adult law enforcement agents, melt away. “We’ll be there as soon as we can,” she said, nodding at the others before closing the Farnsworth, and hoping that they understood the unvoiced caveat to that statement: Even if I have to make the Delta ticketing system sing the Hallelujah Chorus, we’ll be there as soon as we can.

She couldn’t be certain that they understood that in South Dakota.

But judging from Steve’s arm around her shoulders, at least here in Georgia, that message had been well received.


	2. Checking the Perimeter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claudia starts to find out more about what happened in DC, and then starts to figure out just how she feels about it all.

The next few weeks brought forth a hailstorm of information, some of which sailed right over Claudia’s head, and some of which flew low enough to hit her right between the eyes. 

The first and worst hit was the news that SHIELD had been infiltrated by Hydra. When this broke, Claudia swore that she saw Artie’s head actually spin around in a full circle. Of course, since this was just before he latched onto her and tasked them both with going over the Warehouse systems with the finest of fine-tooth combs, it was possible that her sleep-deprived, overly-caffeinated brain had just decided to give up and start hallucinating retroactively.

Following that came the surprise that the hailstorm all centered around one man: a guy from Brooklyn named Steve Rogers, AKA THE American Icon, A True Historical Legend, Captain Frickin’ America himself. Claudia had never really bought into the story SHIELD had been spinning for the last two years, mainly because she couldn’t hear someone say, “We found a hero from World War II, safely frozen in nature’s own cryo, and defrosted him for modern-day use,” without wanting to hack the personal email of SHIELD’s directors and tell each and every one of them that they were all lying liars who lie.

But as she dug through the sheer tonnage of info the Black Widow (And wasn’t that just the coolest of code names?) had released onto the ‘Net, she found that she was slowly becoming a believer. Some of the things SHIELD had encountered over the last few decades were outlandish enough to make the “Accidental Recovery of Captain Rogers” look too tame to be made up. And she couldn’t just dismiss all of it as propaganda and lies, because if it was, then she’d have no choice but to hole up in a cabin somewhere and start calling herself the “UnaHacker” or something equally uncool like that.

Besides, she worked in a place where both Alice’s Looking Glass and Achilles’s Arrow sat on shelves collecting dust. Disbelieving a spooky government agency was one thing; disbelieving in the outlandish was a lot like asking her to turn her back and spit on the gods of her house. 

And no one spat on her baby. The Warehouse was expecting her to be its future caretaker one day, and her not being ready to accept that responsibility just yet didn’t mean she didn’t love that wonderfully magical place with all of her heart and all of her soul.

So…Captain America was real. And based on the reports she was hearing, as honest and idealistic as all of the legends had made him out to be.

Amazing, she thought. The idea was simply amazing.

So amazing, she had to admit she was having a hard time wrapping her brain around it. So amazing, that she just had to mention it to her Steve while they were out doing an item-by-item inventory of the most dangerous artifacts in the Warehouse. 

(Artie was never going to be calm again, she’d decided. She’d already proven to him that their systems were secure, but the entire mess had ramped up his pre-existing paranoia to new, previously unheard of levels. Thank the Warehouse that Pete and Myka hadn’t actually lost any friends in the SHIELD attack. Otherwise, she and Steve would be there suffering his craziness without anyone else available to do at least some of the heavy lifting.) 

Of course, being her, she couldn’t just come right out and say what was bothering her. She had to ease her way into it, feel him out a bit on the subject first.

Thus, she heard herself asking, as she skirted her way around the lines on the floor that marked off the circle of despair emanating from Sylvia Plath’s typewriter, “Hey, Jinksy, have you read any of the articles they’ve been writing about Captain America lately? Because I’ve gotta tell you, the pictures they’ve been running with them…” 

She paused in her circling, so that she could drop her head back and blink her eyes coquettishly at him, like she was a Southern belle with a bad case of the vapors. “Wow,” she said, waving her hands around. “I had no idea Grampa Liberty was such a hottie. Did you?”

“Um…” He glanced up at her from where he was putting on a pair of purple neutralizer gloves. “That depends…” he said, as he tugged on the protective gear a bit more forcefully than was strictly necessary. “Why the sudden interest? I didn’t think you liked him at all.”

She snorted. “No, what I didn’t like was the idea that SHIELD had dug up some lookalike and given him the costume just so they could drum up some good PR.” She moved past the typewriter and started closing in on Attila the Hun’s helmet. “Now that I know that’s not the case, I can appreciate how cute he is. And I was just wondering if you felt the same.”

“Um…” He said again, and this time, when she looked back at him, she thought she noticed a little bit of pinkness around his ears. “Maybe…” he said.

“Maybe…” she parroted back at him, shaking her head teasingly, and then grinning as she watched the tips of his ears slowly turn red. “Oh, I know what that means…” she said.

“Claudia,” he said. And now the redness was definitely moving down to include his neck. “Could we not talk about this here? We’re in the Dark Vault after all.”

“But Jinksy…” she said, still grinning, before his scowl made her sigh dramatically and nod her head. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I’ll get back to work. But you owe me, Lucy.” She pointed her finger at him. “When we’re done here today, you’ve got some ‘splaining to do.”

“I look forward to it,” he said, rolling his eyes. “So much, I can’t tell you.”

Cackling gleefully, her own misgivings on the subject temporarily forgotten, she pointed herself back towards Attila’s helmet and started tugging her own gloves on.

It was inventory taking time.


End file.
